Urban Arcadias: Émigré Experts, Spatial Knowledge, and the Rise of Zionist-Israeli Planning, 1933-1953. Diss Abstract.pdf (original) (raw)

This study provides a first history of the emergence of urban and national planning in Jewish Palestine/Israel (1933-1953), placing it in the wider context of the international planning movement and the flow of knowledge, ideas and expertise within it. I do so by critically excavating the individual work of three German-émigré planners during the British Mandate period, all of whom later became senior state planners in early statehood: Eliezer Leonid Brutzkus (1907-1987), Ariel Anselm Kahane (1907-1986), and Artur Glikson (1911-1966). Their planning work, which has mostly escaped the scholars' radar, embodies a unique encounter between German cultural sensibilities and professional traditions, British colonial practices and the Zionist ideology. Operating at a time of global turmoil, each produced a distinct imagination for national " Urban Arcadias " , grounded in the local settler enterprise, yet enthusiastically participating in the universal quest for a new social order. Essentially a work of planning history, this project also combines the perspectives of social history, history of the built-environment disciplines and Middle East studies. It takes as its point of departure underexplored aspects of planning, a distinct policy expertise that originated in fin-de-siècle industrial Europe and which evolved in the first half of the twentieth-century from a voluntarist, urban field to an influential public policy expertise concerned with large-scale planning. It highlights crucial, yet largely neglected, questions regarding spatial policy, including national and regional land use, town-country relations, settlement structure, demography and economy, and their encounter with emergent ideas on state interventionism and technocracy. Following an introductory chapter, which considers historiographical and theoretical aspects, a separate chapter is devoted to the work of each of the three planners during the British Mandate period. It progresses chronologically from Brutzkus' introduction of functional-economic planning in the late 1930's, to Kahane's formalistic-aesthetic techno-utopian proposals for postwar reconstruction, and then moving on to Glikson's environmentalist approach, which